


Prompt: Thinking of You

by chels0792



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: M/M, maybe a little smutty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 21:16:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14756459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chels0792/pseuds/chels0792
Summary: A couple quick little drabbles via prompt, to scare off the writer's block I'm having with Right Down the Middle.Prompt: Thinking of You





	1. Helios and Phaethon

**Author's Note:**

> Here's to Vaecordia, who inspires me to try new things and especially new writing styles!

Alfred liked to be coddled. He liked to be pinned with soft hands to soft sheets and made to bare his throat to a wet tongue or sharp teeth. With glass blue eyes he would stare fixedly at the wall until he felt one or the other, and breathe too evenly for calm.

He liked very much, Ivan was pleased to learn, to be kissed. When Alfred’s wild heart pounded like a fleeing thing in his chest and Ivan could lay his lips over blue veins and feel, as if it was his own, a frantic desire to be free of the bedroom, of the blanket, of the confounding press of the gravity which imprisoned them all—then he could sweeten his tongue with the flavors of green grass and honey and the freshest water from a stream, and Alfred would settle beneath him, quieted and comforted and sweet as the bounty he gave.

Alfred—a fascination of dualistic nature, both a savage and an innocent—a creature of unbridled energy and fleeting passions—he was a delight and a peril to bed. The boy knew no reservation to violence and no hesitation to using it. He was in an instant mewling, and in the next spitting with rage. Ivan took every pain to keep him calm and willing, to keep his lips formed into an unanswered prayer. God did not respond, but Ivan did.

Alfred liked to be praised, and to praise him was Ivan’s true delight. To tell him that his heated skin felt like the dancing of flames in the hearth; the sigh from his lips, a ring of heavenly bells; the sweat that wet his yellow hair to golden thread, a heady liquor; the beat of his heart, the native drum of wise ancestry; the frightening strength of his limbs, a tectonic compulsion; the striking blue of his eyes a mirrored reflection, a glimpse of the limitless wonders and the vast reach of space; their glimmer a white-hot net of stars, every wet blink a fresh constellation; to tell him this brought him joy and opened Alfred beneath him to pleasures, to aching, to trembling.

By nature, Alfred was fearless; by living, he was made cautious. He met Ivan with wide, searching eyes and a heart that pounded warnings in a language Ivan had forgotten how to speak. He sought the comfort of kisses early and often, and would remain rigid as iron until a caress or a murmur— _you are so beautiful, my angel_ —could temper his resolve.

The rust of living could not weaken the steel in Alfred’s bones. He could crush Ivan like Samson in the temple, but instead in his misgivings Alfred clutched at the sheet, he hid his face, he bit down on a knuckle and ripped the pillow. He trusted Ivan as only a man of good heart could trust, and in his arms became at once uncertain and resolutely determined to feel, to take what Ivan loved to give.

Alfred liked to be coddled. He liked to be pinned and praised, kissed deeply and cradled, reassured and coaxed open like a crimson rose to dew. He was a blushing Titan, an eager Adonis, both Helios and Phaethon. He was exquisite, a novelty and an addiction which Ivan did not choose to imagine his bed without.

Their time, Ivan knew, would not last. He did not count the nights. He did not count the days. He memorized the youthful arch of a cheekbone, the honesty in a plated white smile, the glitter of celestial blue eyes. He would know every contour, would examine Alfred’s dreaming until the sun rose and Ivan wondered— _Russia, did you sleep?—_ what of him would remain when Alfred opened golden wings to fly for the sun.

He could not follow. He would remain, and he would gaze at the most noble of stars and remember threads of gold and that Alfred would press his tongue to his teeth when he rolled his eyes— _of course, podsolnukh_ —and the infectious sound of his laughter and the strength of his embrace, and that unbearably handsome smile.

_Are you crying?_

 He would remain. He would stand on the coldest land on Earth and stand tall to the storms and to the hatred of his people and he would feel the heat of Arizona in June and taste the sweetness of a freshly-plucked apple from the tree. He would roll snow in his palm and pretend to play. He would smile.

_A little too much today, huh._

When Alfred bored with him, Ivan would remain. He would remain a testament to the love Alfred awoke in a heart he had been so certain could not love; a monument to love freely given and love taken, a warning to the young and vigorous and a joke to his elders, who must have known from the moment he began that Ivan would remain, alone.

_You don’t have to let go._

They could not know that Ivan shed tears not of bitterness—which tasted of grit and rust—or tears of sorrow, which flavored the tongue with the cloying saccharin of syrup and cream—but of life’s greatest joy: to be loved deeply, changeably; to be loved with such force that he was transformed into something entirely new, something as exquisitely beautiful as the one who loved him.   

               


	2. Aurora Borealis

He needed— _needed—_ to see the Aurora Borealis from Russian soil. He needed to compare. He had to know.

Ivan always answered the phone. Alfred could imagine him in the darkness of his office, fingertips pressed to his temple, lost in thought when the sound of a bell interrupted his paperwork. He could see the sudden wash of white light, could watch long fingers reach for the phone. Did he smile?

He tried to annoy Ivan, for a while. He called when he knew Ivan would be sleeping, for no other purpose but to complain about some small thing. He set a timer to see how long he could chatter. He broke his record. He tried for a new one. Ivan listened as if he had nothing else to do. He liked to ask Alfred about his day, about his brothers, about his lunch. About anything, and Alfred realized one afternoon as he adjusted the webcam that Ivan just liked to hear him talk.

Mattie’s eyes were a misted sort of color, like the shadow beneath a snowbank, or a frozen lake on Christmas morning. Ivan’s eyes were different. He just had a hunch.

The Soviet Union was heavy in the worst sort of way: crushingly, horrifically heavy, with a razorblade smile and a grip made of steel. He won what he wanted through brute, devastating force and kept what was his with suffocating weight. He pinned and punished, and soaked up pain like it sustained him, like water, like breath.

Ivan was bigger than Alfred. He was wider, taller, denser, heavier. His hands were larger and his arms were rounder and sometimes Alfred thought his thighs were as thick around as his own head, or maybe more.

He pinned Alfred to the bed with open palms, undemanding. When Alfred resisted, mouth filled with reasons, he kissed him until Alfred would let himself be pinned again. When Alfred, brow furrowed, reached upward for comfort, Ivan closed and locked iron arms around him with the certainty of a prison cell. He liked to hold him, and god help him, did Alfred need to be held. Ivan could hold his entire body in the barrel between his boots, and Alfred would think with his face buried in the curve of Ivan’s shoulder that more than anything, his weight was reassuring.

He caught every anxious tap of the heel, every half-taken breath. Ivan behaved as if he could taste Alfred’s thoughts on his skin, and at times Alfred wondered if maybe he could. Ivan was all patient hands and deep kisses and oh, he murmured the most amazing things; and with such sincerity that Alfred could almost—and sometimes silently, guiltily, he did— believe he was made of gold and gems and all the precious things Ivan said he could see. Ivan liked pretty things.

Some nights, he fought. Some days filled him with guilt and self-contempt and turned the grinning man in the mirror into some half-human mimicry of what Alfred had hoped he would someday be, and those nights weren’t easy on anyone, least of all Alfred himself.

He knew he was dangerous, but Ivan never flinched. He wasn’t afraid. He met Alfred head to head, vicious to vicious, hand to hand, eye to brilliant violet eyes.

Maybe Ivan would take him out to Murmansk. They could ski, and Alfred would make excuses to stay out late. They could drink hot chocolate. Ivan loved to stargaze.

Ivan never tired. Ivan always understood, and Alfred alternately hated and appreciated him. Ivan’s arms were a forbidden luxury—for him, he would think with disgust, was he really that greedy?—and in his black-magic voice he weaved curses Alfred couldn’t bear: _come to me_ and _hush, Alfred_ and _angel_ and _little one, don’t cry._

When kisses tasted like salt, Alfred wished more than anything that he was human. When Ivan ignored the kicking of his heels to lock him in his arms and lay deadweight over him—and god, that’s just what he’d hoped he would do—Alfred demanded a freedom he didn’t want to be given.

When Alfred clutched him in an embrace that might have crushed a weaker man, finally lay conquered and exhausted and heavy in the blankets, then Ivan would blaspheme: _oh, little one_ , and _Alfred, all is well_ and _even your tears are diamonds._

And then: _You have been sent to me, Alfred, to remind me._

Alfred would spit through teeth gritted around the bit of sorrow: _I hate us both._

And Ivan, with a smile that was both bitter and tender, would place a kiss on his lips and say, _we have only us, only now_ and _Fedya, enough._

Shadows would dance on the ceiling, cast through the curtain that covered their shame, and Alfred would gaze upward with eyes filled with diamonds and see two eagles with silhouette wings lifted for flight. Wind would whisper past the old gables and Alfred would close his eyes and let the diamonds roll down his face, and let his strength leave him and clutch at the sheets and say nothing, do nothing, fight for nothing at all.

On the worst of nights he thought surely, _surely, this one is the last._ Because _nothing lasts forever,_ _Ivan_ and _this won’t end pretty._

Ivan would kiss him and caress him with hands he couldn’t imagine exacting pain and Alfred would mourn his good sense and his sanity, and he would let it all disappear on the backs of black eagles who shook their shadowy feathers and made to soar together for the stars.

_God himself cannot make this heart beat._

Ivan needed so little light to live, because he carried light within him. But he couldn’t see it, and no one had ever told him why his eyes were such an odd color. Hadn’t anyone bothered to look?

_It does not beat for me._

Ivan was in love with love, and he so desperately wanted to give it all away. How could he not see that he was already filled with life?

_Oh, Alfred._

He needed to see the Lights from Russian soil. He needed to show Ivan.

_Even tears._

He needed Ivan to see what Alfred could see—before it was too late.

_Is there nothing you cannot make more lovely?_

He needed to know that Ivan knew. The man who endured everything and carried around a bright little candle of hope, the man who only cried when he was alone and who wailed with a kind of grief Alfred hoped to god he never felt firsthand. The man who fiercely protected his heart whether the old thing beat or not, just in case he was still alive, and the man who couldn’t stand to see a child’s tears. The man who kept with him every symbol of family and friendship he’d ever been given, because he needed to know he had once been loved; because for Ivan, to have been loved—Alfred had begun to realize—was enough to carry on for centuries alone.

_You are an angel._

Eventually—how cruel that no one could tell them when—the eagles would fly a little too close to the nearest star. They would fall back to Earth, and when the carcasses lay rotting he could look up from Alaska and see the colors in the sky, and remember the man with powerful, gentle hands and the sweetest razorblade smile, the one who carried Aurora in his eyes and the hopes of humanity in his chest, and who kept none of it for himself.  

 


End file.
